Rome and the School

WHEN
the popes, at the end of the fourteenth century, returned from Avignon, Rome
was a dead city. Some thousands of miserable people camped amid the circuses
that had been invaded by briars and nettles, amid the shattered aqueducts and
the gutted baths. Life round about was at work in the free cities. But here,
nothing lived. Certain popes, touched by the spirit of Humanism, tried to
create a center of attraction through which a few wandering artists, not one of
whom becomes the founder of a line, will consent to pass. It is Florence and Umbria
that furnish the court of Rome with the architects and painters whom it calls
in to build and decorate its churches: Gentile da Fabriano, Bernardino
Rossellino, Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Melozzo da Forli, and
Bramante. The inner activity of Rome will never be sufficient to supply her
needs. When artists are born in Rome, we shall find that they are men of
diffuse and empty mind, such as are demanded by idle societies to amuse them in
their laziness and to flatter their vanity.

But it
is the only shelter open to the Italian soul as it is about to ripen. At the
moment when Florence succumbs, when Charles VIII, disguised as the champion of
order, descends into Italy, da Vinci fertilizes Milan and is about to reveal to
France the already exploded profundity of Tuscan passion. Giorgione, in a form
that has attained almost its complete expansion, ushers in the whole of Venice,
where Titian is appearing. The old land of Umbria is being animated anew and is
looking toward Rome. The Italian artist is seeking to free himself from
formulas and to spread his liberty about him. When Julius II, the warrior and
artist-pope, addresses himself to the architect Bramante, who is soon to summon
his young relative Raphael, and calls Michael Angelo from Florence less than
two years afterward, it is the spirit of the period that inspires him. Amid the
general anarchy which delivers the Italian communes over to the foreigner, and
confronted by Venice's policy of protection, Rome is indeed the only place
where Italy can sum up her desires.

Rome
has such strength through the sadness of her horizon, her isolation at the
center of a desert of reeds and grasses, her vast ruins, and the weight of her
history, that she did not permit the masters who had spent their youth in
distant places to bring Italy to her without first compelling them to accept
that disciplining of the will by means of which she could, after so many
storms, still dominate the world. She obliged Bramante to recognize this force;
she infused it into the fragile Raphael; she made it the habitual food of
Michael Angelo. Like Brunelleschi, a hundred years earlier, Bramante lived in
the ruins, compass in hand. It was there that he recovered the laws of Roman
architecture and of all architecture, the subordination of the organ to the
function, which the despotic and fantastic mind of Michael Angelo—when he
himself succeeded to the direction of the building of Saint Peter's—could not
apply to the problems of construction, but which, in the voluntary and rigorous
inelasticity of his powerful intellect, he found again when he came to design
the façade and the court of the Palazzo Farnese, a theorem of stone in which
the tragic spirit of the world appears in Italy for the last time. Raphael and
Michael Angelo could study the mutilated statues which were daily torn from the
earth by the excavators, and the possession of which was contested by the Pope
and the Roman princes. This hourly contact with the Rome of antiquity could not
fail to react upon sensibilities which, like these, summarized two centuries of
waiting and working.

But
neither could it pervert them. They came from the heart of the race with too
great an outburst and through too great a necessity for them to deviate from
the path that it laid out for them. The intellectual idealism of Florence, the
sentimentalism of the Umbrian painters, and the sensuality of Venice, which
Sebastiano del Piombo brought to Rome, were spontaneously amalgamated with the
will of the masons and the statue makers of the Empire who built the aqueducts,
the thermae, and the circuses, and who carved upon the arches of triumph the
rude bas-reliefs upon which the Roman genius had stamped its imprint. For a
moment, the whole Italian soul found its realization. Never had a passion equal
to this one, wherein violence and gentleness, voluptuousness and asceticism,
science and enthusiasm, clashed and merged in turn, accepted a similar frame
without being crushed by so severe a discipline.

The
Renaissance brought back form, full, sculptural, and athletic—not at all the
Greek form, but rather the Roman in the predominance given to the projections
of the muscles as a means of expression—but a form lifted up by such ardor that
it remained wholly Italian while opening up new epochs. Never had so much
matter and spirit been welded together to recreate life in its highest unity.

When we
go as far back as the currents which lead to Raphael, it is only to his
education in Rome that we can attribute the rise in him of that force of which
he would probably have remained ignorant had he not left Urbino or had he
continued to live at Perugia or even in Florence. For in that tender and almost
feminine nature which his apologists have exalted in a way that brings despair
to the hearts of those who love him best, there was a masculine power which
doubtless helped to arouse Michael Angelo, and which unfolded with the ease,
the authority, and the amplitude of things that mature naturally. Never did any
man unite so many scattered and almost antagonistic elements, assimilating them
with his inmost substance and giving them forth again in his work—living and
spreading out freely and high above its sources while retaining all their
freshness.

Beginning
with the end of the fourteenth century, Umbria, from which we must consider
that he came—for his sixteenth year was probably not yet passed when he entered
the studio of Perugino—Umbria had grafted upon the old Sienese school a very
living branch, even though it is apt to escape our attention because of the
splendor shed by the great fire of Florence. With its back to the mountains,
but descending with all its cities toward the gentle plain, Umbria had a soul
whose piety is the greater because the proximity of Rome so frequently exposed
it to invasion. It was in the heart of Umbria, in sight of Perugia, that
Francis of Assisi was born; it was Umbria that first followed him. In an
attenuated form, the light of that spirit still floated over its valleys.

Florence,
and even Siena, were sufficient to themselves. Perugia was too distant from the
great centers of the elaboration and of the influence of Italian energy to
retain the artists that expressed it. It was toward Rome that almost all of
them gravitated, bringing with them something of Siena, which had first
instructed them, something of Florence whither, in general, they went to be
initiated; and, by way of Urbino, Bologna, and Ferrara, bringing with them a
little of Padua and Venice. Pisanello, the Veronese, after having received in
Florence the lessons of Andrea del Castagno, collaborated, in Rome, with
Gentile da Fabriano, the Umbrian, whose art had been formed by the Sienese.
Gentile preserved their memory of the Byzantine mosaics and their blond faces
with the slanting eyes; but in Rome, and more especially in Venice, he had seen
the passing of the processions made splendid by the brilliance of the costumes.
Of an abounding imagination, he had more curiosity than the masters of Siena,
and, with a sense of movement and a love of the picturesque which they, in
their gravity, could not have endured, he possessed the expansive piety of
Umbria, so different from their jealous mysticism. Benozzo Gozzoli, when he
worked at Rome, as he had worked practically in every part of Italy, suddenly
became acquainted with this work and gained from it, in part, his taste for the
exotic and his Oriental perfume.

In Rome
he doubtless saw also the work of Piero della Francesca. That great painter, a
nomadic artist, like all those who came to Rome at that period, was but little
older than himself. His schematic landscapes certainly lived on in the memory
of Gozzoli, when he covered the walls of the Campo Santo of Pisa with the red
paintings in which the delicate countrysides, traversed by the Florentines,
sink into its horizons. But the nature of Gozzoli is as fantastic as that of
Piero is severe and homogeneous. Moreover, though he came from a region which
borders on Umbria, one more mountainous and wild, it is true, his contrast with
the masters of that province is one of the astounding things which characterize
Italy from Dante and Giotto to Michael Angelo and Raphael, and which contrast
Machiavelli with Francis of Assisi. Piero painted sharp profiles that seem
hollowed out in copper, robes embroidered with flowers as pointed as thorns,
and great austere figures isolated by a pure line. Horizontal clouds were
gathered in a sky where the divine dove stretched out rigid wings. A terrible
majesty lifted the children of his mind above the brows of other men. His
angelic musicians seemed like caryatids made to uphold the sonorous vault that
invisibly extended over the gloomy highway. The deep tones of their violins
were carried over into his harmonies. When he painted war, he was as hard as
war; when he painted the night, one saw nothing of it save a cuirass, the point
of a lance, and the faces of the sleepers. His mind was such as would be formed
by the methodical and tenacious study of all the exact sciences then known. He
wrote treatises on perspective. He tried to subordinate nature to the geometrical
principles that had formed his mind. Thus the fusion of the living element
which our sensibility reveals to us, and of the mathematical element into which
our intelligence leads us, came about in his work—the strongest expression of
the fierce insistence with which the Italians sought the absolute agreement
between science and art; with him, the manner of seeking this accord is
stricter than with Paolo Uccello, less factitious than with da Vinci. The
figures in his frescoes are built one above the other like houses, with an
architecture so powerful that the torsos and the shoulders, the arms, and the
heads dominating the necks seem to be determined by exact calculation.
Cylindrical torsos, broad shoulders, round arms, necks like columns, and
spherical heads whose eyes look straight before them. One thinks of his
personages almost as statues walking or kneeling, and the energy that erects
them pours into their full form with the weight of brass. It is as pure and
strong as the antique. Not one among the noble Italians, not Giotto, nor della
Quercia, nor Masaccio, nor Michael Angelo expresses what is proudest in our
unique adventure of life with greater heroism than that of Piero. He is perhaps
the greatest among those invincible men who, through all the storms, oppressed
by passion, resorting to murder if necessary, and accepting life like an
every-day drama, went onward, their eyes fixed on something higher and more
tragic that lay eternally ahead of them, something which they felt in their
resolute and desperate hearts. He goes through the world in company with the
heroes of his frescoes, pitiless, pure as force, and inaccessible to
resignation. The trunk of the tree is bare, the leaves are motionless, but
something is rising and diffusing itself everywhere, a burning central sap that
holds them erect and makes them hard. The somber earth itself seems to be
formed of curves which the subterranean fire has fitted one into the other, as
if to obey some rational power which co-ordinates its efforts. There is no more
sublime work in Italy. And it is a decisive moment. Rome and Tuscany meet in
Piero della Francesca, and his two principal pupils, Luca Signorelli and
Melozzo da Forli, announce, one, the approach of Michael Angelo; the other,
that of Raphael.

The Umbrian
current, which will touch Raphael, is accelerated with Melozzo, born like
himself in that other trans-Appenine Umbria from which Gentile also came and
which the Bolognese Francia was to connect with Venice. Florentine
intellectualism is too difficult of approach for simple souls, and the mystic
reaction to which it gave birth is too severe to enable them to find in it the
easy piety that satisfies them and that cannot frighten the court of Rome,
which has no love for mystics. With Melozzo da Forli, one seems to hear the
passing of the slightest breeze, the fingers of great blond angels touch their
celestial harps and draw from them an undefined and distant music which is not
to be confused with the storm of the trumpets of the Last Judgment. With Perugino,
pious Umbria will be merely bigoted Umbria. The strong capital is misunderstood
by its painters, and the square palaces, the hillside streets, and the whole
heap of cubes and towers inspire Bonfigli alone with those stone landscapes in
which repose his doubtful Virgins and his too elegant angels. He who translates
its needs is a man who believes in nothing, who drinks and curses and takes up
religious work in order to get rich [Vasari]. Such is the revenge of art when
bigots attempt to take possession of it.

Perugino
was the first to manufacture pictures of a merely ecclesiastical utility. It
was not that he was without grace, a mannered grace which gives a somewhat
irritating quality to his pretty Umbrian faces—blond, full, pink, and fresh,
where the smile of Leonardo, now become insipid and a trifle silly, gives a
curl to the flowerlike lips. Into the art of painting he introduced symmetry,
which is the opposite of equilibrium, and he banished movement from space by
the hardness of his sugared blues, greens, and reds, which he sets down raw and
with scarcely more than a haphazard orchestration. His rounded vigor, his
equivocal but robust elegance, his sharp precision in the drawing of
backgrounds, slender trees, and the undulating lines of the valleys and the
hills, the energy of his straight figures in which a monotonous rhythm gives a
twist to the hips, places the foot on the earth, and gives to all the attitudes
a strange appearance of dancing, all this explains sufficiently, nevertheless,
the influence that he exercised on Raphael, who, after his departure from
Urbino, spent his most impressionable years in Perugino's workshop. He felt the
vigor of the rhythms—precise, very personal, very complete, and conceived
almost like a motionless ballet—which Perugino stamped upon his forms in
movement. It was extremely difficult for him to free himself from his master,
and he died too soon ever to forget him entirely. At the end of his short and
miraculous journey, he still retained, from the painter of Perugia, the
countenance of the Umbrian Virgin, which we shall scarcely find again, to tell
the truth, save in his pictures of the saints—and which represent so small a
part of the man! The countenance almost disappears from his last frescoes,
remaining as only a faint memory in his portraits of women; they are pictures
as pure, as solid, as opaque and dense as a blond marble.

When he
left Umbria, he passed through Siena, where, for a time, he was given work by
Bernardino Pinturricchio, who, like himself, had come from the workshop of
Perugia and who was returning from Rome, where he had painted the apartments of
the Borgias. At Siena he met Sodoma, his elder by a few years, who was stifling
in the holy city, haunted as he was by da Vinci, foreseeing Venice, and fashioned,
besides, in the school of Luca Signorelli, whose robust frescoes of Monte
Oliveto he had completed. He was a singular being, a poor fakir, who was
believed to have practiced the most unmentionable vices, but whose art,
nevertheless, reveals the ingenuousness of a young god fallen from the cool
peaks of Olympus into a century fermenting with knowledge and with pleasure. He
is a kind of reversed Masaccio, not having preserved, like the Florentine hero,
his original purity in his terrible thirst for knowledge; indeed, he is quite
the contrary of Masaccio, as he bitterly seeks to recover his original purity
through the satisfaction of that very thirst. And yet he resembles Masaccio in
being destined to open a new path upon which he himself will hardly more than
set foot. Quite often one can see both Michael Angelo and Raphael in him. At
such times he possesses a strength and a grace which are both heroic, and the
touch of corruption and of enervation which he mingles with them serves only to
render more touching his nostalgic passion and the magnificence of the lyricism
through which we feel his anguish. It is in this way that the most profound
Platonists of Florence might have painted at the most sensual moment of the
Venetian maturity. The "Wedding of Alexander and Roxana" is, in this
sense, a work that is unique in the world, through the sublime accent of its
masculine and disenchanted poetry which makes clear to us, under the
transparence of the veils and in the soft penumbra, the irresistible and fatal
voluptuousness. The nude figures—male and female—have an indescribable
character that partakes at once of Eden and of Greece and that Christianity
would have animated with an ecstasy of feverish, restless love. Sodoma is a
strange spirit, full of youthful strength through which the mystic perfume of
the old masters of his country mounts to the restless faces. The forms hesitate
in their affirmation of his science, and their athletic power grows noble in a
melancholy ardor which cannot quite reveal itself. He is intoxicated with the
caress of hard bosoms, slim waists, and the knees of women, in which he sees a
special beauty; his wayward spirit feels the needs of men and he hesitates. All
his life he hesitates. Later on, at Rome, Raphael refused to efface his
decorations. He had well observed Sodoma's haughty grace, and the carriage of a
conqueror enslaved by an incurable adolescence. . . He remembered it forever;
perhaps he took from it the strongest elements of that magnificent handwriting
by means of which he was to express all his pride of youth and his gratitude to
nature for having made him what he was.

Even
the sharp and charming Pinturricchio could not retard the impulsiveness with
which he cast himself upon antique form, that hymn to the nude body which was
rising everywhere, breaking the yoke of Florence, bursting forth at this very
hour in Venice in the mature work of Giovanni Bellini, swelling still more in
the nascent work of Giorgione and of Titian, and which was to take on, with the
voice of Michael Angelo, the tragic power of a new creation. He was very far,
to be sure, from Pinturricchio, the meticulous technician whose bad taste,
perverse and free, led to the spreading out of so much metal and so many
transparent stones on the frescoes which he worked in relief. Nevertheless, in
his rapid excursion through the bizarre exoticism of that singular artist, he
noted the cold, delicate landscapes engraved as if on a pane of glass by means
of a diamond, and the slender grace of the silhouettes that cleft the motley
crowds with gestures like those of dancers. Pinturricchio developed in central
Italy that spirit of the mirage and of far-away adventure, that fairy fancy
which Gentile de Fabriano had diffused in the peninsula, with which Gozzoli had
amused austere Florence, and which Carpaccio, among the Venetians, was at that
moment carrying to its most astounding limits of fantasy and lyricism. The
oceans opened up in the distance, the stars rained upon the earth, the poetry
of imagined worlds charmed those precocious children who knew too much and who
profited by the new sensations flowing in upon them from every side to renew in
them their somewhat wearied inventiveness. It was from Pinturricchio, perhaps,
and from the spirit of central Italy, brought to him by Perugino, that Raphael
learned the enchantment of penetrating beyond the immediate vision and the
subject imposed; he learned something of it even from Francia, whose vigorous
but discordant and dry painting must soon have wearied him. After that he had
only to seek in Florence, in the work of da Vinci and of Fra Bartolommeo, and
especially in that of Masaccio, the sense of modeling and the need for
architecture in a canvas; later on, he had only to watch his friend Sebastiano
del Piombo painting in Rome and revealing the nascent desire of Venice, to
sweep into a symphony, becoming more complex as he grew older, all the confused
voices in which, for a century, the enthusiasm, the pain, the fever, and the
will of Italy had been mounting.